| 
| Author: Susan Jacoby
Publisher: Pantheon
Category: Book
List Price: $26.00
Buy New: $15.48
You Save: $10.52 (40%)
New (30) Used (20) Collectible (1) from $11.98
Avg. Customer Rating:  99 reviews
Sales Rank: 3960
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 384
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.5
Dimensions (in): 9.4 x 6.4 x 1.6
ISBN: 0375423745
Dewey Decimal Number: 973.91
EAN: 9780375423741
ASIN: 0375423745
Publication Date: February 12, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
|
| Customer Reviews:
 Review May 27, 2008
0 out of 7 found this review helpful
I'm only a few pages in, and I am reading two other books right now, but I like it.
This book will make you think May 24, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
This book seems somewhat disjointed and its different parts unconnected, but it did make me think about problems in American culture and gave me the impetus to explore those problems in greater detail. Some of the topics include the "Dumbing Down" of American culture and the demise of Middlebrow culture.
My explorations led me to Popular Culture And High Culture: An Analysis And Evaluation Of Taste Revised And Updated, Second Edition by Herbert J. Gans. Gans counters the Dumbing Down critique with examples of "Smartening Up". He cites the use of "more complicated terminolgy and abstractions" in today's newspapers and magazines compared with those in the 1950's and before as just one example. Gans makes the general argument that the public deserves the culture it wants, whether it be high or low.
In short, Jacoby has written a stimulating book.
 Compelling, but could have been a lot better May 23, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
When Susan Jacoby was still in college forty years ago, she was moved and inspired by Richard Hofstadter's well-known 1963 work Anti-Intellectualism in American Life. Jacoby's book attempts to pick up Hofstadter's theme and take it forward from the 60's into the millennium, and the attempt is laudable but a little weak.
On most points I agree 100%, such as with her assertions that the average U.S. citizen's intellectual base is sadly lacking and shrinking by the day. Somehow, a scarily large majority of Americans are more formally educated, yet less knowledgeable than ever before. All the reasons why that is, however, are not adequately explored here. While she does manage to isolate a few contributors, such as the explosion in television programs that barely appeal to the lowest common denominator, gaming, the dumbing-down of educational standards, and the decline in reading and other intellectual pursuits, I would have liked to see far more detailed research and statistics on these points and a lot less of her long, meandering, and often thinly connected reminisces about the past. Her treatise on `middlebrow' vs. `highbrow' culture is completely out of place here and really belongs in another kind of study altogether. She also takes the all-too-common tack of using her work as a personal political soapbox, something I truly loathe in any writer of any political persuasion.
Where she excels, though, is her exploration of the political landscape and how the gaping chasm between the two major parties has actually caused much of the problem, and how the far-right religious fundamentalists have made their own unique and devastating contribution. One of the best sequences in the book is the discussion regarding education, science and evolution, and the war being waged between "creationists" and scientists. For example, creationists have largely hijacked the word "theory" and somehow spread the completely false idea that the way we tend to use the word in the vernacular, which is more akin to "opinion", is the same way scientists use it - which of course could not be further from the truth since scientific theory is far more than an `opinion'. She also laments the fact that 25% of high-school biology teachers believe that human beings and dinosaurs shared the earth, and more than a third of Americans can't name a single First Amendment right. I also found myself nodding vigorously in agreement when she bewails the severe decline in general reading and the teaching of literature at all academic levels.
In the larger view, beyond individual issues, the spotlighting of what Jacoby calls "willful ignorance", coupled with what I call just plain ignorance born of mental apathy and poor education, is compelling. While in whole this book could have been better, it does have value and wouldn't be out of place in the library of anyone interested in material about intellectualism in America.
Disappointing but still a good book May 13, 2008
7 out of 8 found this review helpful
I was very excited when this book came out and was really looking forward to reading it. I can't think of a more timely or important topic for a book. However I found the book very disappointing. Far from a scholarly and insightful look at the issue, the book reads more like a stream of consciousness style rant. The author makes some valid points here and there but then goes off on inexplicable rants. For example, she comments, correctly, that digital communication and email don't evoke the same emotions or require the same level of intellectual effort of traditional letters. But instead of delving into this valid point more deeply, she merely waxes nostalgic about the letters she and her fiance exchanged in the 60s. In another example, she bemoans the erosion of political discourse but instead of thoughtfully discussing this interesting point, she provides us with little more than juvenile taunting of George Bush's inability to pronounce the word "nuclear". Now I am a flaming liberal and far from a Bush apologist and I enjoy a good dig at him as much as anyone, but it seemed out of place, neither funny nor thoughtful, in this context.
In summary, the book has a lot of good ideas and offers a basic, if superficial, overview of the problem of anti-intellectualism within a historic context. Maybe I had too high expectations and perhaps someone coming to this book for a lighter overview of the issue will find it enjoyable. However, on the whole, the book was disappointing to me. There's not really much "meat" to the discussion or any sort of meaningful synthesis. It's something of an irony that only in a dumbed down, lowbrow culture could this book be seen as a thoughtful or important contribution to the discussion.
 Jacoby reveals herself May 9, 2008
9 out of 37 found this review helpful
"The Age of American Unreason" tells us far more about its author, Susan Jacoby, than it says about our recent US history, which she describes in her own selected terms. Her put-down characterizations of our society are as largely being middlebrow, anti-intellectual, and fundamentalist. These are her own designations of the primary themes of our US society. Our society has succeeded in many, many ways in spite of her observations. Still from her New York based pseudo-intellectual society, we are largely social and cultural failures. Bah-humbug, to use a literary phrase, the failure in analysis is hers, as is very well documented in her book.
The book is not recommended for anyone under 40, who has not directly experienced the recent historic successes of our society for the most of its citizens. People over 70 may enjoy critiquing her basically ultra-liberal commentary on our society. The book study group which I lead has very much enjoyed doing so.
|
|
|
